State debates what to release when child abuse is nearly fatal

By Laurel Rosenhall, CALmatters

June 11, 2016Updated: June 12, 2016 4:52pm

Photo: Rich Pedroncelli, Associated Press

Sen. Holly Mitchell, D-Los Angeles, speaks on a measure before the Senate, Thursday, June 2, 2016, in Sacramento, Calif. By a 22-14 vote, the Senate approved Mitchell's bill, SB966, Thursday, that would end a practice of extending jail and prison sentences for repeat drug offenders. The measure now goes to the Assembly. (AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli)

Sen. Holly Mitchell, D-Los Angeles, speaks on a measure before the...

How much information should be available to the public in cases of severe child abuse?

California lawmakers and Gov. Jerry Brown’s administration have been at odds over that question for two years. Legislators recently rejected a proposal to limit public access to reports on abuse so extreme that children nearly die.

The schism reflects a fight between advocates for children and foster youths, on the one hand, and, on the other, the government agencies and workers tasked with protecting them from harm.

At stake is almost $5 million in federal funds and the outcome of a debate pitting privacy arguments against revelations of what social workers knew about a family situation before a child was nearly killed. State law already requires the release of original caseworker reports when children die from abuse or neglect, sometimes exposing serious lapses in the government’s care of vulnerable children.

“We spend a lot of time talking about the value of transparency in government, and I think that applies to this scenario, too,” state Sen. Holly Mitchell, D-Los Angeles, said of cases deemed “near fatalities.”

“If shedding light on a particular practice, a particular worker, can create … a different internal procedure that can have a positive outcome for the next child, that should be our collective goal,” Mitchell said.

Mitchell chairs the Senate committee that turned down a proposal from Brown’s Department of Social Services to require summaries of social worker reports — not the reports themselves — to be disclosed in near-fatal child abuse cases.

Over the last eight years, 855 children in California were abused so severely that their cases qualified as near-fatalities, according to the Department of Social Services. The term is used when abuse victims end up in serious or critical condition. During the same period, 980 California children died from abuse.

Cracked skull

In a high-profile Los Angeles case, documents released after 8-year-old Gabriel Martinez died in 2013 with a cracked skull and broken ribs showed that local officials had left him with his mother despite having investigated her for abuse six times. Records also showed an unresolved allegation of abuse that social workers had failed to investigate in the time required by law.

By contrast, state law is silent on the release of information when children barely survive abuse.

“We were proposing to create a process that would require disclosures,” said Michael Weston, a deputy director in the Department of Social Services. “There are currently no laws that require reporting.”

The department pitched a similar plan to the Legislature last year, but lawmakers did not accept it. This year, officials came back arguing that California is at risk of losing almost $5 million in federal funding if it does not pass a law defining what information must be made public in near-fatal abuse cases. Disclosing a summary of findings would protect the privacy of a child recovering from abuse and adults or siblings in the home who were not responsible for it, state officials said, while meeting federal reporting requirements.

Their plan had support from the Service Employees International Union, which represents social workers, and the County Welfare Directors Association, which represents local agencies that oversee child protective services.

But Ed Howard, a lobbyist for the Children’s Advocacy Institute, protested that the administration’s approach “elevated the needs of government over the needs of kids.” Foster youth groups objected, too, arguing that original documents are more informative and that releasing them after near-fatalities would force counties to improve how they look out for children.

Children’s advocates and newspaper publishers lobbied for a bill that would require disclosure of reports on near-fatalities the same way it’s done when youngsters die.

The administration’s latest proposal surfaced last month as part of Brown’s revised state budget blueprint — a common way of passing laws that may be only tangentially related to the budget and avoids the lengthier vetting that regular bills receive.

“They simply thrust it on everyone with this gun-to-the-head approach and attempted to get it jammed into the budget that way,” said Jim Ewert, lobbyist for the California Newspaper Publishers Association, which promotes open government and access to public records.

Lawmakers rejected the proposal after the outcry from advocates. A new version is in the works, several people involved in the negotiations said, and could take shape in the budget that Brown and lawmakers must complete this month or in later legislation.

CALmatters is a nonprofit journalism venture dedicated to exploring state policies andpolitics. For more stories by Laurel Rosenhall, go to www.calmatters.org/newsanalysis.